


Proverbial Ropes

by belle0511



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canon Compliant, Dealing with pain/grief, Gen, Post S09E04, Sad Sam, s9 spoilers, so far anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-01
Updated: 2013-11-01
Packaged: 2017-12-31 03:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,087
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1026485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belle0511/pseuds/belle0511
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Emotionally at the end of his rope, Sam needs a place to crash and calls on an old friend. Written in response to Safiyabat's Home for Wayward Antichrists prompt on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proverbial Ropes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Safiyabat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/gifts).



> First post, haven't written in a long time, but couldn't stop thinking about the prompt so I gave it a go. I loved Sam and Jody's relationship in Time After Time so I felt like if he was really lost, he might turn to her for help.

The nights were so much worse than the days. During the day she could find plenty of things to keep her busy. There was work, there was the day to day tasks that adults have to complete to be considered functional, contributing members of society – shopping, cooking, eating, showering, the normal list. It was usually enough to keep her mind occupied, which was a good thing.

Not that it was always easy. There was a time when folding her pitiful collection of personal clothing that the warmth and the smell from the basket triggered some type of sense-memory of doing the same for baby clothes and bibs and blankets and suddenly she was sobbing over a basket of fucking clothes. She wrapped a towel around herself so she could keep the warmth and the laundry smell close and cried on the couch until she fell asleep. 

Laundry memory-hijacks aside, however, daytime was better than night time. Night time it was too quiet, too still in her house. That’s when the voices would pick up – the house itself would accuse her. It whispered to her tonight of all the bad decisions she made that brought her to this. You’re a cop, it would say. It’s your job to protect people, and you couldn’t even protect your own. You worthless failure. What kind of mother were you, anyway?

“Fuck you.” She raised a toast to the house and downed the rest of her glass of wine. 

The knock on the door came so quickly it appeared to be an answer to her toast. 

She carried her gun with her to the door, because she might be both half-drunk and half-crazy, but she certainly wasn’t stupid. Bobby Singer (who died when she still really needed him, the bastard) had taught her well enough that the gun was loaded with silver bullets and there was salt and holy water stashed strategically around the house. But none of that turned out to be necessary when she opened the door and saw who was standing on her porch.

“Sam?”

She took in his face, the slump of his shoulders, the way he held himself. Her first thought was that he looked tired. Then she saw it was much deeper than that. The eyes, they always tell the true story. She’d seen that emptiness far too many times. In the eyes of the junkies who knew they were one fix away from the end. In the eyes of the prostitutes who had been treated as commodities for so long they believed it to be true. In the eyes of the desperate young mothers with nowhere to go and no way to feed their babies. In the goddamn mirror. 

It was the look of someone who had lost all they used to hold onto. Somebody at the end of their proverbial rope.

“I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go,” he said. 

Stunned, she just stared. The silence stretched between them, and he turned to leave, as though her shocked silence equaled rejection.

“I didn’t mean to bother you, Sheriff Mills,” he muttered as he turned. “I’ll go.”

“It’s Jody,” she said, opening the door wider. “And come in.”

She learned a lot of things the first few days he stayed with her. One, it was a lot nicer coming home in the evening with someone there. Two, a couple of damaged people are perfectly capable of being together in the same space without talking, for hours. Three, 6 foot 4 Winchesters eat a lot. A whole lot. 

Her grocery bill had tripled and she didn’t care. She bought him organic produce because she remembered Bobby griping about his “fussy” eating habits. She washed his clothes, which consisted of the outfit he had on at her door that first night, two other shirts, and one other pair of jeans. On the second day, after seeing how little he brought with him, she wrote down sizes from the tags and went shopping. His mumbled “Thank you” when she presented him with her purchases was the only thing he said the first three days.

It was day four before he broke the companionable silence between them and started talking. It began with a recap of what had happened since she last saw him. She learned of demon tablets, killing hellhounds, and angels falling. That last one was no big surprise – she’d known something was up with the whole “unprecedented meteor shower.” He relayed it with factual precision, almost as if he were telling the story of events that happened to someone else. 

She got a phone call on day five. She was surprised it had taken that long. Her original plan was to play dumb and say no, she’d heard nothing from anyone. That went out the window with the first few frantic words Dean breathed out over the line. 

“He’s here, he’s safe, I’m looking after him,” she said. She forestalled all other questions, and held firm even when he begged. No, you can’t talk to him. No, I won’t tell him to go home. No, you can’t come here. No, he hasn’t told me what happened. 

She hung up after promising to call Dean if anything changed, and said she would try to find out where he was headed if he left.

That night she popped an obscene amount of popcorn and he built a fire in her fireplace. They went through way too much beer and popcorn for only two people and she told Bobby stories. She laughed until tears flowed, and then the tears flowed more as she cried for a friend she found almost too late and lost way too soon. Sam told her about finding Bobby in hell, and both of them just stared at the fire and drank. Comfortable silence again - two people content just to sit and hurt together. 

How can you help him? the house asked her that night when she crawled into her cold, empty bed. You’re too damaged to be any good to anyone else. 

She rolled over on her back and flipped off the ceiling. 

It was a week after he first arrived when she learned the real reason Sam Winchester came to her door.

He had built another fire, and she had bought another case of beer. She’d felt a need for some real home-cooked food and made a meatloaf with garlic mashed potatoes, asparagus, and from-scratch brownies. While they ate they talked - he described the bunker, telling her how excited Dean was to have a real kitchen. It was the first time in seven days he had said his brother’s name.

As if the name itself held the key that unlocked everything else, the rest of the story came pouring out. Ezekiel, the possession, the holes in his memory, the strange feeling of wrongness that convinced him eventually to recruit Kevin’s help. How the young prophet figured out what was happening, and the two of them, working behind Dean’s back, came up with a ritual from the angel tablet that forced the Ezekiel out.

The words, the descriptions tumbled over one another as if now that he had begun, he had to finish and tell it all. She listened, sipped her beer, and reached over to take his hand. He squeezed it like a lifeline. Holding on to that rope’s end.

He finished and stared at the fire. She wanted to say something, but found she could only look at him. The firelight reflected off the beer bottle he held to his lips, and she caught the glistening of unshed tears in his eyes. 

She wanted to grab him and hold him and tell him that nothing would ever hurt him again. She ached with the need to reach for him, touch him, but she just sat there. Did nothing. Said nothing.

You coward, the house whispered to her.

Screw that. 

“Do you ever hear voices?” she asked, taking a swig of her beer.

“Uhhh…well I have hallucinated Lucifer before, if that counts,” he said. 

“No. I mean, look, I don’t mean literal voices. Just, some inner voice telling you that you suck. That you never do anything right. That your choices are always wrong.”

He responded with a bitter laugh. “I think I’ve cornered the market on bad choices.”

“Hey, you’re talking to the lady who went on a date with the king of hell,” she said. “So, I think I do have room to talk here.”

“Well, you’re drinking a beer with the guy who became Satan, so I think I still win that one,” he answered back. The bitterness and self-loathing in his voice was a palpable thing, looming between them.

“Funny,” she lowered her voice and looked down at her beer. “I thought I was sharing a drink with the man who saved the world.”

She turned to see if he heard her and saw he had become utterly still. He seemed frozen in that moment of consideration, the words being processed over and over as if he were trying to find some deeper meaning in them. 

If she hadn’t been watching him so intently, she would have missed the minute shake of his head, when he dismissed the words, and her.

Oh, hell no. She wasn’t going to let that stand.

“You listen to me, young man,” she said, in her very best Mom voice. 

“Don’t you dare shrug off what I said like it doesn’t matter. You saved the fucking world, Sam, and don’t you forget it.

“But I know you hear those voices, that tell you you’re no good because I hear them and I know what it looks like. You hear them so often, you believe them and you get to where you can’t remember a time when you didn’t hear them and that you didn’t believe them. And what they say becomes the only truth you know anymore.”

She faltered then, not sure how to do this. Dammit, not me, she thought. I’m not the right one for this. 

But then she looked at him. Sam was staring at her, and in those eyes she read the reality of the situation. He needed her to finish. He needed her to tell him something, anything he could believe. He needed her.

God help me. I’m his rope. 

She took a deep breath, forged on.

“I don’t know what to say. I really don’t. Probably anything I say you’ll shrug off, and act like it doesn’t matter. 

“I can tell you tons of stuff that I don’t think you can even hear right now, or believe – that you’re loved, you’re valued, you matter to people. God, if you’d only heard your brother’s voice the other day on the phone – he was in pieces. He loves you so damn much. Bobby – Bobby loved you so goddamned much at times he got choked up just talking about you.

“I don’t know if that matters to you. I don’t know if I’m doing this right, and I’ll admit I’m probably not. Heaven knows I’m no poster child for mental health.

“But I do know this - if my son had lived, Sam, I would have been damn proud if he’d turned out like you.”

And that - raw, desperate truth that it was, seemed to be the one thing that he heard.

She did reach for him then, and she held him and ran her fingers through his hair as he breathed unevenly against her. 

The night wore on and he talked this time, really talked. She tucked her feet under herself on the couch and leaned against him. She cried silently at times, at other times she answered him, but mostly she just listened.

She listened, she made soothing noises, she comforted him. 

It tore a fresh, wide wound into a part of her she had locked away and the pain was excruciating. She didn’t fight it though – it was a necessary pain. The pain of healing, and being alive. 

It occurred to her that despite what she’d been told about no God and no plan and nothing but chaos and violence, it might not have been an accident that led this broken boy without a mother to the door of a mother without a son. 

When she sent him to bed an hour before dawn, she could feel the extent of her exhaustion in every bone. She stayed up, watching the fire burn down to embers and waited for the house to say something, anything. 

It stayed silent.


End file.
